This is just an utter mess. Google keeps ignoring and trying to kill Hangouts (which should still be called GChat, that was an incredibly stupid rebrand), and building new products instead of investing in the one which actually has some potential.

Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it. It was great on the early versions of Android! The failure here is entirely self imposed and a major indictment of their senior management team.

I was there when that happened. The whole rebranding/transition of GTalk/GChat was the result of some political muscle flex by Social and its army of PMs, then after Social lost its favorite child status Allo was born as a result, championed by another army of PMs, and I wonder if Duo had a similar story of birth.

>Google could have been a major player in messaging if they had just stuck with GChat/Google talk from the early Gmail days and kept investing in it.

That's just not what Google was back then. It was all about PMs/designers wanting to jump onto the shinest and newest projects and lots of politics were involved to win support/attention/resources from the top management.

This is exactly what I suspected Google to be like but I always assumed I was just stereotyping. A bunch of competing teams and internal politics frustrating the ability to have coherence and "synergy".

I once worked at a startup that made the mistake of hiring an entire remote product team from silicon valley. All they did in the year before they mass resigned was inject drama and politics into everything and force some really bad design decisions that will quite possibly kill the company in a year or so. Got me thinking what it must be like at scale.

> This is exactly what I suspected Google to be like but I always assumed I was just stereotyping. A bunch of competing teams and internal politics frustrating the ability to have coherence and "synergy".

Interesting, because it seems (from the outside) like that was what Microsoft was like internally for years. Blogs like mini-ms seemed to confirm some of that, but of course that was "just one side" of the story.

That was Microsoft before its transition over the past few years. Essentially every single product it’s own vertical with nothing shared, this went right down to having separate switches and server racks managed by separate people.

It’s quite an amazing transformation Microsoft has gone through, never complete of course, but still impressive.

This happens in every company that employs the Vitality Curve method for employee performance metrics. It ensures only highly visible projects are incentivized, regardless of their actual value added. You are promoted under such systems by merely paying lip service to your manager's assignments, and instead spending your time creating some widget, and exaggerating its usefulness non-stop until someone in upper management buys into your self-promotional hype. "I don't care if the world doesn't need this, it's going on my OKR's dammit!" Your product is green-lighted, and you get a promo. Then your product is pulled some years later futher pissing off your users. Try to operate in an environment like this without affecting the morale of your colleagues though. Go ahead, I'll watch. After dealing with such systems for over a decade I've learned I don't actually enjoy playing Game of Thrones every quarter with my co-workers.

There must be a name for a concept that seems like it would be obviously true, but actually isn't.

I don't think it's a bad thing that google ha a diverse set of products that didn't work together. I don't need my google calc/excel to integrate with youtube, and I don't need google play music to integrate with gmail.

Google should look at these things as individual companies, which it seems like is something that they finally somewhat figured out with the alphabet rebrand. Just let gmail be a successful company on its own, and let youtube be a successful company on its own. From my perspective as a user, things actually get worse when all of these things try to play together.

> I don't need my google calc/excel to integrate with youtube, and I don't need google play music to integrate with gmail. Google should look at these things as individual companies, which it seems like is something that they finally somewhat figured out with the alphabet rebrand.

That makes sense to an extent. Unfortunately, Google has created a number of products or "companies" with overlapping features that are in direct competition with one another. Just in the communication space, they have: Hangouts, Gmail, Inbox, Allo, Duo, Messages, and Google Voice.

These actively compete with one another and make the sum of all the products worse than just one good product. If I want to send an SMS message, I can currently use Hangouts, Messages, or Google Voice. I don't want to decide which to use, and I certainly don't want the one I choose to just disappear one day while I get booted over to another app.

Social was the department that was running Google+ and Hangout, and at one point I think Youtube fell under its control as well? Vic Gundotra was the SVP who ran it. Despite my mixed feelings toward products from Social I had a lot of respect for Vic.

Google's main product is user attention, which they sell to advertisers in the form of advertising.

Right now, they farm this attention mostly through web search, but hone it through data they collect with other venues, such as e.g. location and other data collected from Android handsets, the vast tentacles of Google Analytics, Google DNS, G-Suite (GMail, G Docs, G Drive, ...) etc.

AFAIK, G-Suite for business is actually making money (a round-off error compared to advertising, but still, a profitable business), and the various cloud storage and compute offering are actually making money that is not a round-off error (though still dwarfed by advertising).

Also, they DO need to make better advertising (and farm better attention), because they are in many ways a "natural monopoly" - they're the monopoly because they are the best in many ways, mostly not because of network effects or anti-competitive behaviour (which they have practiced at times, especially with YouTube, but not nearly to the extent practiced by any other player of this size).

> they're the monopoly because they are the best in many ways, mostly not because of network effects or anti-competitive behaviour

Not true. Their advertising business is absolutely built on network effects. Advertisers advertise where there is user data (anything else is a money losing proposition), and lots of user data collection only happens in services that have the money to host (and curate) a large search index, which in turn needs a healthy and growing ad business.

It's a self-serving cycle that eventually leads to one player becoming the monopoly.

Weird, because I pay them monthly for google play music, and for google apps, and for youtube red, and for youtube TV.

I also have several android devices, and look forward to paying them every time I get into a waymo.

Google has LOTS of products. The "you aren't the customer you're the product!" redditism is just wrong. It's something that sounds really insightful if you don't know anything about the company, or are trying to stir up drama.

PM is a super heavily overloaded term that you'll run across in pretty much any company larger than small, definitely not specific to Google (disclaimer: I work at Google and don't speak for the company, but I'm brand new so my conception of the categories comes from what I've seen elsewhere). Engineers tend to raise an eyebrow at the entire job category because they're thinking of bad experiences with one particular flavor of PM (and often a particularly poor specimen at that), but that can be unfair, a lot of what they do is absolutely critical to business.

The acronym simply means either product manager, project manager, or program manager, but the responsibilities can be any/all of the following, and probably more, depending on the company:

- Full product owner, "the buck stops here" person. Many different possible titles here other than PM (usually "project manager" if that's the title), like general manager (GM), different flavors of producer, product owner (PO), VP of X, etc.

- Feature designer/owner/manager (product manager): writing specs (junior), pitching specs (mid-level), setting and selling product vision (senior), driving strategy (staff/exec, though at that level all roles start to get blurry). Decent business school grad representation here, you have to be good at strategy, negotiation, communication, and Powerpoint; having good product ideas helps a lot, too, but not if you can't sell them. A persuasive PM of this type is a force to be reckoned with and will get a lot of executive attention, which can be very good or very bad depending on whether the strategy they're into pans out or not. This is probably the type of PM the parent was talking about "armies of".

- Development director (project manager or program manager): a whip-cracker at worst or an impenetrable shitshield at best, they manage the practicalities of running a project, like project scoping, meeting and managing hard/soft deadlines, handling support, cross-team communications, processes, compliance, etc., often stepping in as an all-purpose guard against randomization so that others can focus on producing the product. Many PMs of this type ended up being the go-to folks for GDPR compliance over the past couple years, so it's not just internal process stuff that they deal with.

- Task checker: can blend into to the development director mentioned above, but at some companies this sort of PM will mainly focus on tracking tasks that are in-progress, getting estimates, watching velocity, and sending reports up the chain. Some devs find this role pointless and annoying, but it really depends on how good they are - if they're solid, they'll find a lot of ways to improve things instead of just tracking them.

- Scrum Master (project manager): Big-S Scrum is falling out of favor so it's not as fashionable to have this title anymore, but within some processes a similar role still exists as a type of project manager. In a nutshell, Scrum is a simple yet effective "People Over Process" process that consists of a bi-weekly no-laptops-allowed retrospective meeting where you get the team together to have a free-ranging discussion where everyone feels heard, so that you can all decide together whether the team should estimate engineering tasks in terms of hours or hats. You need a trained and certified Master because otherwise people new to Scrum might not know to pick hats. A more seasoned Scrum Master will also schedule a quarterly retrospective-retrospective where the team discusses a strategy for what guidelines to put in place for the next retrospective so that the team can decide on hats faster and leave more time for the less settled question about whether or not the Fibonacci sequence is the right way to count hats or if a size-based approach will make people feel better supported in their work.

- Monetization designer (product manager): mainly at game companies, PM is often a super different role, probably best described as the profitability-focused counterpart to a game designer. They focus on setting prices, managing game economies, speccing and evaluating A/B tests, inventing loot boxes, etc. Ideally PM and designer would be one and the same, and the game design would be holistic with the monetization, with a designer that has serious Excel/analytics chops and deep inspiration and sensitivity about gameplay, but that's a more rare combination than you'd think, so a lot of companies split them out.

I'm probably missing some other ways this acronym is overloaded, but I think this covers most of it.

> You need a trained and certified Master because otherwise people new to Scrum might not know to pick hats

You certainly don't need a certified scrum master. Ideally, the scrum master should be somebody who is already in the team. A scrum master who does just that is really a project manager, and having a project manager is, IMHO, antithetical to doing scrum.

According to scrum, the scrum master is not the product owner and not a member of the dev team, but rather an objective person who does just the scrum master duties, e.g. facilitating when needed, e.g. making sure people are following scrum instead of getting distracted, not stalled by roadblocks, not taking marching orders from more than one product owner, etc. In scrum, the dev team organizes its time after priorities are set. Scrum does not want a scrum master to be a project manager - if you’ve seen that they’re just mixing unnecessary stuff into scrum and scrum is getting a bad rap for that. I don’t see a scrum master as being a full-time job unless they’re working with multiple teams, so it could easily be anyone knowledgeable outside the team who will objectively play the role.

For the record, project managers aren't the problem. Google having no clue how to hire good product managers is the problem. This is why Amazon doesn't have problems like this, our PM's really are world class. But our obsession with mid-level managers is getting out of hand, so I suppose we're all headed in the same direction.

that's how it starts. first the middle managers, then good engineers leave because of said middle managers. then middle managers hire troves of contractors to justify their jobs. then contractors who knows where the bodies are buried become the new engineers. and then you have a Google.

There no polite way of expressing it: Hangouts Chat is a shitty product. We moved to Chat when Hipchat was closed. Because we’re using G-suite it seem sensible to go with Chat, but everyone hates it.

The UI is useless, Google try to be clever about “conversation” and tries to group them together, but now people miss most conversations that happen when they aren’t looking. Notification is broken, you can only get to many or not enough.

Chat seems to be designed by the same incompetent team of interns that did Google Groups. Using the two products feel oddly similar.

Our team was in exact same situation. Chat is still missing some features, but I definitely prefer it over HipChat already. Still a compromise in comparison to Flowdock or even Slack, but it gets the job done.

Unfortunately its a tricky UX problem that I haven't seen anyone master. Threads work well in Slack when you have a team culture that uses them consistently -- the channel sets the topic and threads keep individual discussions focused.But that requires a lot of effort in culture building which most people won't or can't do. And its still not a silver bullet, just an improvement. Taste's vary of course.

A small sidenote: chats are shitty concept in general. They have had a reason in a past era when voice coms are expensive and limited, they have a reason in terminals to broadcast few messages, no more.

For real communication we have letter so in digital world mails or we have phone calls so in digital world VoIP one's extended with eventually video/screen sharing and conferencing capabilities, no more.

Discord, Slack, ... are all only a mean to keep abandonware live for business purpose and, unfortunately, many companies fell in the grave. People who want productivity should rediscover classic software, modernized to actual "graphic style" but nothing more so:

- good desktop MUA (I can, unfortunately, only list notmuch-emacs, mu4e, mutt, pine) instead of limited and limiting webmails. Of course we have to add few things to the mix like having our mails in a local maildir and a good filtering/autorefile/autotagging solution (alot, IMAPFilter);

- good VoIP desk/softphones, something like old sip-communicator (now Jitsy);

- local, well integrated, productivity suite. Mine is Emacs, not easy to convince office guys to learn it, but even ancient plain office suite can do the business with a decent DMS that enforce good taxonomy and have decent full-text search (YaCy for search, nothing for DMS in my list... They are all crap)...

I couldn't possibly disagree more. Voice comms are _hideously_ inefficient and limited compared to chats and virtually always an inferior option in a group context, in a professional context, and especially for a professional team. They always interrupt one person, and every additional person involved is a decision about how much more time and attention to take and how many more interruptions to make balanced against who to leave out of communication. They are slower for groups over around 4 people, they are more likely to produce misunderstandings, more likely to omit details. They make it harder to refer back to things, they leave less of a window for people to gather their thoughts and word things clearly. They are far more likely to be rushed through because the communication is fully synchronous. They cannot divert into simultaneous side conversations. I struggle to think of situations where I'd rather have a voice call than a text conversation.

If a potential employer told me they relied on VoIP phones over Slack/Discord I would consider that a _major_ point against them.

> A small sidenote: chats are shitty concept in general. They have had a reason in a past era when voice coms are expensive and limited, they have a reason in terminals to broadcast few messages, no more.

Not at all. Voice chat is synchronous - you must stop whatever you're doing and listen or talk in real time. And people nearby will overhear.

Chat is asynchronous and private. I can chat and consult a colleague while I'm in a meeting with a client. I can keep a chat open while coding and read/respond when I'm not most concentrated. I can go offline and answer a question the next day.

Text chat isn't literally "chatting through text". It's email with a different UX, more suited for quick communication.

I still have to find something LESS productive than "chat while doing different things", perhaps even less than having an opposite (same, depending on personal orientation) sex beauty, naked, dancing winking at you...

Many have thought and still think that multitasking and quick things are productive, I see the exact opposite. And we can see it at another level in mean per capita hourly productivity: in the past (so before business model substantially merge around the world) French hourly productivity was the highest in the world, and they are still one of the less-working in term of hours and holidays. USA, Japan and Germany are the opposite, they work far more and have a far lower hourly productivity. To the over extreme try the difference between a lover vs a prostitute...

Open spaces are another TOTALLY unproductive things, born only to push more economic constructions sold as a higher price and facilitate reorganization. The letter also is one of the less productive thing we have if done constantly because any change, if positive, demand time to start pay back, doing constantly means NEVER get paid back, only suffer the change itself.

I'm also one of those that was / is still sad about losing XMPP integration. Highly customizable alerts are borderline essential if you have a lot of threads going, but hangouts seems determined to prevent you from doing any of that.

This mapping isn't correct. Hangouts does all of the above - video chats, voice chats, text with emojis, pictures and videos.

Hangouts is also integrated with Google Voice and GMail. So when someone calls my GV phone number, it rings on my cell phone and in any open GMail tab (but not in the GMail app). I get an SMS, it pops up as a hangouts message too.

It is a mess, but trying to kill Hangouts is insane, it's deeply integrated and it's extremely convenient to use.

I think there's another way look at this. Per "Zero to One" Google is a very powerful monopoly. It wants to protect that position, as well as make it less noticeable.

All these "side projects" create the illusion that Google is not a monopoly. More importantly, new Product X, whatever it is, helps to attract new top talent. Top Talent is going to want to fix old things, they want to build new.

While this might sound a bit extreme, even if it's not actually true (in tandem) both of these "incentives" are real. Google does need to mask its dominance. And it does need to attract top talent (if only to keep soneone else from acquiring it).

> More importantly, new Product X, whatever it is, helps to attract new top talent. Top Talent is going to want to fix old things, they want to build new.

Is that really true? I would personally chose to work on Facetime than Google's new messaging system, all else being equal.

Facetime is really solid and I'm sure I could learn a ton from the expertise there; as well as working on something new within that product.

In contrast, Google's messaging systems just seem like a mess. I would feel like it could be cancelled at any time, that we didn't have the best talent (because it's spread across the various systems) and honestly would be slightly embarrassed to talk about it ("yeah, I know, yet another message system from Google").

Is no one in charge of marketing or strategy in Google? Surely you can rewrite all the code underlying the product you like, forklift replace it if you want. But why endlessly rebrand existing products. Just keep the brand going. Or converge/consolidate branding even if the underlying software might be different between target markets, like Microsoft did with all its different messaging platforms over time. Now it’s Skype. And Skype for Business. (They’re very different.)

I agree with you 100% and if you analyze the comments on HN everytime Google decides to mess around with their IM, I have seen similar sentiment around Gtalk.
I was a regular user of Gtalk during college days 10 years ago and was pissed when they merge/transition them into hangouts.
It is a poor product management decision driven by Google's philosophy of capitalizing the next big trend in the internet industry ignoring the preferences of their users.

The text of the blog post is very confusing at best. I consistently got the feeling we have no idea how to do messaging, and we are throwing many things to see which one sticks. In other words, the blog post felt like it was a post about telling how we have no idea what we are doing using some thousand words.

Messages app is very primitive. I like hangouts way more. I can hop from text message to video chat with family with a single click. My project fi integrates nicely too, and to me this is a pretty good value prop.

Same. I adore hangouts, ugly and 'outdated' as it is. With Fi/Voice, it integrates perfectly as to call or text from any internet device. And who cares about wifi calling or volte support when with hangouts, everything is over data always and more reliable. Killing it is a mistake. It's the only Google product I'd gladly pay a monthly fee to use...

But as for Hangouts being flawless messaging and not just some buggy app, I have to disagree.

Often I'll type a message and hit send, it will stay in sending and never actually send. I'll need to kill the app and when I reopen, the message is gone but if I retype it and hit send, it sends immediately. This is on a Pixel 2 with Project Fi or WiFi.

Clearly that aren't doing something properly and I feel quality of the app has degraded as their efforts go elsewhere, viz. Allo, messages, etc.

>Often I'll type a message and hit send, it will stay in sending and never actually send. I'll need to kill the app and when I reopen, the message is gone but if I retype it and hit send, it sends immediately. This is on a Pixel 2 with Project Fi or WiFi.

I have a Pixel 2, with Project Fi, and haven't ever really had this issue.

I suspect they mean that once you've logged in with your Apple ID, which is pretty much required to use an iOS device beyond the stock apps, iMessage and FaceTime both get set up.

So, if setting up a phone for nana, you take it out of the box, set her up with an Apple ID, put it back in the box, send it to her, she takes it out of the box, and then you call or text her, all she has to do is answer the call. No futzing with downloading the right app, no having to make sure the person on the other end is using the same chat service; just doing it.

I mean, it's not like it'd be terribly hard to have an initial setup screen asking if you'd like to use Hangouts or not. I wouldn't trust Google not to make it seem mandatory, though. Or to put it in just to please Europe but in actual fact just breeze past it.

Three weeks later you log on to your iMac/mac-mini/whatever that you hardly ever use to find messages from whoever uses apple phones and has your email address on their contacts. It turns out that logging in to your desktop PC can link your AppleId (email address) to iMessage and start swallowing your text messages. You can only rectify this setting on an apple computer.

(Yes, I know I'm an edge case but I will never see iMessage as a good thing, walled gardens can suck).

You're onto something. This should be a chart though, and encompass the whole scope of Google's attempts at messaging over the years. Plot out all the bundling (Hangouts & G+) and unbundling (Allo's features -> Messages) like xkcd's movie narrative charts: https://xkcd.com/657/

At any given moment in time, Google's messaging attempts look silly and confusing, but imagine seeing it over time - it'd look downright insane.

I felt like Allo was actually a really great product. Comparing it's UX and features to other messaging apps out there, I felt like it was one of the most polished (iMessage or FB Messenger being similar). From a product strategy POV, it felt like a product targeting Asia (specifically India, as it launched with Indian themed sticker packs), at least at launch, but that changed over time. Also, it's important to distinguish Allo from Hangouts from the account perspective. Allo is phone # tied, like WhatsApp/Telegram. So definitely trying to go after a different market segment. It just failed.

Duo continues to be awesome. Being a FaceTime competitor that is cross-platform is great. No account needed, just simply start a video chat from your address book (or from the App).

Hangouts is... something special. There are clearly reasons things happened the way they did. But I think it's good to see that Hangouts Chat/Meet will be open to consumers eventually.

Allo is an awful product that should never have been greenlit. It was a huge step back on Google's core mission "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessibleand useful." Not only could you not search your chat history from other devices, but you couldn't even use it from other devices at launch, and even when that was fixed, it was clunky.

Much better would have been to attach phone numbers to Hangouts, similar to how iMessage ties phone numbers to Apple IDs.

2. it didn't auto discover people like whatsapp does(or atleast it didn't when i tried it initially), people needed to sign up for it adding friction to an already unpleasant process of getting people to switch

3. duo wasn't in allo and allo wasn't in duo. if there had been just one app it would have had a greater value prop(at the time) of chats with video chatting. instead there was a whole 'nother app to manage. once whatsapp announced voice calls(followed by video) getting anyone to "allo/duo" was absurd

4.i remember number porting was buggy in some way, just flat out didn't work for 2 days

can't remember the rest but i remember something about the emojis bugging me(google implementation different from whatsapp) and being unable to send pdfs

it needed to compete from day one not "find it's feet" gradually. i find this to be a problem with all google products really

And this works even if your phone is off, lost, broken, or has no service. Hangouts also works on any device with an internet connection if you log in. You can text and call from your number on literally any device just by signing into hangouts. None of the multitude of other redundant Google messaging products does any of this. Even their official replacement "messages" only works if your phone is on and has service.

You don't even need a phone to call and text from a laptop through GMail from your phone number. That functionality will be lost.

I agree with you 100%. Most of the time when I'm receiving a text I'm sitting in front of my computer with a Gmail tab open. So the ability to text back directly from my computer (with a full size keyboard) is absolutely the killer feature of Hangouts integrating the Google Voice/Fi phone number.

I simply cannot imagine using anything else. Those who haven't experienced this workflow don't know what they are missing.

I do 200-400 texts weekly and this saves me easily 1 hour per week in gained efficiency (context switching, fumbling with phone fingerprint unlocking, composing text on small phone keyboard...)

> So the ability to text back directly from my computer (with a full size keyboard) is absolutely the killer feature of Hangouts integrating the Google Voice/Fi phone number.

Another Google Fi user here. To be clear (since this was a shock when I learned it this morning) - you can text from your computer with a full size keyboard with Android Messages now. It's just more WhatsApp-style where it's paired with your phone, so you need to have your phone on and working. It also isn't integrated right into Gmail. So it's not as nice but it's got the "killer feature" of texting from your computer (which, I agree, is killer) at least.

This is what bugs me. It's not an overly complicated idea, and I feel many users would actually pay for it. Why has nobody tried? When I search for alternatives, I only find business offerings, with worse functionality.

I just want to use my provider for data. Lemme call and text via the web/app, keep my number safe, and my money is yours...

It's interesting to remember that it was born out eating multiple existing services (GChat/GoogleTalk, Huddle, and some other things probably). When it launched, it was trying to cleanup Google's fragmented text/video messaging strategy.

One funny thing is how message history search worked. There is no in-app searching history. You can search on the Gmail desktop client and see history, but no where else (no mobile app. Not in Inbox. No-where but gmail desktop).

Along the way they added SMS support for it, which they later scrapped for everyone except Project Fi/Voice customers.

Hangouts has done a lot in the last 5.5 years (since its launch). It may have tried to do too much, which may have caused some problems (especially on usability).

Hangouts Chat and Meet seem to try to start fresh and build a good product focused on business customers. How that plays out for normal gmail consumers has yet to be seen; I'm really hoping they do a good job with it.

What you see as throwing shit at the wall, looks like testing market hypothesis to me.

Google isn't going to win the messaging space by building a kitchen sink messaging app that is compatible with everything, so they need to look for opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on.

Particularly since Google has regulators breathing down their neck, and carriers unwilling to allow an iMessage equivalent on Android.

Google has been working on chat for well over a decade. At what point do they stop "testing market hypothesis" and build the product people want to use?

I don't want to be a Google tester (market or beta), and certainly not for years on end. I don't care about "opportunities in the market that they can capitalize on". Just build one good chat system.

In the areas where Google excels, they didn't get there by applying this throw-everything-at-the-wall strategy. The design of Google Search wasn't the result of 13 years of betas. What do you do when nothing sticks?

If they can stumble around for this long and still feel the need to test half a dozen possible strategies, maybe the correct conclusion is that, unlike Search or Maps, Google doesn't really have anything as a company to offer this product category, and they should just get out and focus on areas where they can contribute.

It's installed by default on most Android devices, and a large portion of Asia's handset market (India) is dominated by Android, but messaging in India is dominated by Whatsapp. So almost-a-billion is bloated download numbers of Indian smartphones coming with hangouts installed, but none of them using it.

Messages mixes up SMS with chat, exactly what I don't want. SMS messages are usually used for couriers notifying about delivery, and spam. I use an SMS-only app on Android to make sure things don't get mixed up. I don't need SMS junk in my chats.

Somehow, I wonder if google is “just” very strong at analyzing vast amounts of data, but weak on core product development. Do they ask questions like who is this for, who will use this, for what purpose, how will they use it etc?

It definitely seems Google is bad at Product Design, but certainly they do not lack for the best talent, so is the problem based upon the structure of the org, stakeholders, something else, both, neither?

It's lack of vision. There are not many in the company who strives for the best product, or have the vision to make a change. As the company got larger, people started caring for more about career and less about great products. People who solve for some director's problem got promoted over the ones who truly deserved it.

Unfortunately, some of the smartest people i know now also looks down on google. This one kid that was an intern for me at MIT (whom i think was way smarter than i am) didn't even bother interviewing with google, he went to spacex.

It really seems like the company must be lacking top-down leadership. It almost seems cliché to bring up Steve Jobs here, but the contrast is striking. One could argue he took things too far the other way: There was one iPhone. It was the perfect size. Hell, there was one mouse button. It was the correct number of buttons. For everyone. But still, it's laughable to imagine this kind of fractured insanity happening at Apple, and for the most part that was to their benefit.

People underestimate the importance of leadership all the time. Google is a company built around being the smartest person in the room, but where are the leaders? A good leader is not necessarily the smartest (in a Google sense) person in the room. How does that person get put in a leadership position in a company like Google?

You mention Jobs. Was he smarter than Woz or a better engineer? No, but he was a much better leader. He inspired people to work, and relentlessly drove his vision. Obviously he didn't always make the right call, but I think we can say with confidence he would not have let this messaging mess drag on for close to 10 years now.

I think there's a lack of connection between Fi and google's other chat products (or even just hangouts and fi) in terms of roadmaps and so on. Fi graduated, now hangouts going away seems a bit... reverse.

I'm pretty sure this blog post was forced due to the recent articles about Hangouts and Allo on 9to5google.com [0], [1].

Thinking that Messages, which uses SMS and RCS were available, would have any impact on messaging is wishful thinking at best. Where I live almost nobody uses SMS for person to person conversations, it's mainly used for package notifications, 2FA codes, and so on. RCS isn't available as far as I know, and I wouldn't want to use a mobile only protocol controlled by the carriers anyway. It's strange that Google, a company that seems to have a phobia of native apps and wants everything done in the browser, would push for this kind of solution.

If Google had used some of their highly payed top tier engineers and at least one competent product manager to develop Hangouts instead of pushing out the mobile only, seemingly India focused, Allo they might have had a chance. Imagine being the person in a family or group of friends that convinced people to switch to Allo, you would look like a fool by now.

Yeah I still use it. I never used a messaging app post gtalk. So many different platforms, it just became a nightmare.

I am still after a lovely opensource cross-platform simple distributed secure messaging and video platform.

I'd read that Allo was being abandoned for Messages. And I'd never heard of Duo until this post. Very confused naming and products at Google. I was trying to get my head around the differences between Play Music and Youtube Music yesterday - a case in point.

> No one uses SMS because it's primitive and limited compared to regular messengers.

You also have to take into account that SMS is 5-10 times more expensive almost everywhere outside the US. Unless you have a flat-rate plan, a single 140 character messages is about 10 cents where I live. And even if you have a flat-rate plan for domestic messages, it's 1-2 USD (per message!) when sent to friends and family abroad. I don't use SMS because it's just being ridiculously over-priced. I want my device to use data to send data, regardless of what kind it is.

It's (sms/texting) free (http://mobile.free.fr/) and unlimited on a 2 euros monthly phone subscription with 2 hours of voice communication in France. That makes it the cheapest way to communicate at all, here. Cheaper than voice and much cheaper than internet data. Even the absolute poorest of the country can use texting. It's more accessible than DATA driven apps and can run on dumb phones.

It's also very unreliable if you're messaging abroad. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. If you're roaming and so is the other person, it becomes even trickier. At least data works and within the EU is pretty much free.

It doesn't matter why, the fact of the matter is that no one uses SMS in these places, which is also true wherever I've lived.

People use Whatsapp primarily, or facebook messenger, or (in my bubble anyway, not so widespread) Telegram. These products have the network effect already established, and no one is likely to go back to crappy SMS, even if it is dressed up.

Other articles have indicated that Google is going the RCS route because they don’t want to rock the boat with mobile carriers, who do not want to see a proprietary chat system like iMessage on their networks.

Someone at Google just wants to make sure that people know where they can go for a consistent and stable messaging experience. I'm just not quite sure if they intend that to be Skype, Facebook, Slack or maybe Discord.

Google chat services have always been a big joke to me. I'd cringe any time someone said "can we Hangout" or "Google Hangout". It's like nobody at google knows what "hang out" means and how that does not apply to conversations.

Is it just me or does Google basically throw a bunch of money at a bunch of things to see what sticks, scrap the failures and repeat the process over and over again - and in the process messing with services some people actually like.

I can no longer put trust in Google's consumer product reliability knowing that at any point Google will shut the service down because it does not meet some internal quota on usage.

I've been in many come-to-Jesus meetings wherein Leadership acknowledges their strategic failures, then busts out a presentation detailing the New Strategy, consisting of mild tweaks of the Existing Strategy.

Mild tweaks are great because they spare Leadership the pain of making hard decisions.

> And by refocusing on Messages and Duo for consumers and Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet for team collaboration

"Instead of working on five products, we're 'refocusing' down to four products." Right.

This has the stench of a post-faction justification that expertly avoids stepping on too many toes. IME Leadership gets axed by Senior Leadership not too long after.

What gets me about the entire Google messaging ecosystem is how they manage to be so bad. My messaging system of choice is Signal, and it looks to be about three or four full time people that work on that. It manages to handle SMS, Grop Chat, Video Chat, and End to End encrypted chat for me. I imagine there are more Vice Presidents assigned to Allo then there are employees at Signal, and signal manages to out compete them.

That doesn’t count all of the iOS people that also use Signal. I use Signal and Apple Messages and didn’t even know Allo existed. I have a perhaps irrational fear of using messaging from Google or Facebook because they have lost my trust.

Why would anyone invest in a Google messaging system when Google is prone to kill it off randomly?

Why do people ever switch chat apps? Besides shutdowns, it's because the new app does something the old one doesn't. Signal's pitch was easy encrypted messaging, but now there are apps that fill that slot, even Facebook Messenger has e2e encrypted chat, so there's not a lot of reason for Google to invest there.

Google Duo has succeeded as an app known for making video calls, which is as much a marketing/positioning achievement as it is a technical one.

There are lots of people declaring they will use a Google product in this thread, but of course no one is going to use a nonexistent product that people imagine as a clone of what already exists. Unless Google finds an "in", they're not going to get anywhere, even with whatever perfect app HN imagines.

signal on desktop it's next to useless and good luck sharing pictures through signal, which it's basic functionality they haven't fixed for years, who is fine with sharing pictures one by one? what is this 90s?

To which many would reply, "Yes, I can Skype with you. I am at work, so I'll be using my Skype for Business program which recently replaced Lync. My Skype will talk to yours, right? Oh it says here that Skype for Business (which used to be Lync (which used to be Office Communicator)), is now Teams, so uhh can you just call me on my phone instead. Thanks

Skype for Business and Teams are not the same app. That said, I've found Teams very lacking in exactly the way Skype is not, and Skype lacking in exactly the way Teams is not which is very frustrating.

i don't think OPs problem is the product itself, just the name. he wants a verb-able product name like Skype.

personally, i just go with "can we talk tomorrow" instead of "can we skype tomorrow", and leave the choice of app for a follow up. I don't think being able to use the product name as a verb is an essential feature of a videoconference app.

Communicating with the people in our lives is one of the most important things we do every day, whether it’s chatting with friends about an upcoming trip, calling mom to check in, or touching base with colleagues.

So when I'm forced to move off hangouts for those connections that I still user over it - what do you think the chances are that I will choose a google product?

Does anyone think that now is Microsoft's best chance to revive Skype as a household name synonymous with chat and video calls? I doubt anyone would want to use any chat app from Google anymore, Facebook is getting really bad PR which could affect WhatsApp as well soon enough. Signal and Telegram are good alternatives but lack marketing muscle. Slack and Discord are mainly used for group chat in professional and gaming circles.

Skype was almost a genericized trademark meaning video call, that seems to have been taken over by Facetime to some extent. If Microsoft would make it easy to chat with friends and businesses from the same app, and threw some fresh paint on it, they might take some of the market back.

They could... if their own messaging strategy wasn’t almost as bad as Google’s. Skype just got a top-to-bottom redesign that everyone hates, and Teams (which may or may not be the replacement for Lync, or Skype for Business, or whatever it’s called now) is like a checklist of everything terrible about Electron applications: it’s slow as molasses, uses boatloads of memory, and has no integration with the host OS. It’s actually worse than Slack, which is an impressive feat!

There’s something hilariously tragic about this being the perfect opportunity for Microsoft to deliver Google a coup-de-grace on messaging, and they can’t do it because they’re just as incompetent.

Does it work from within a browser yet? Last time I tried, installing Skype was a surprising hassle on my Windows machine; there were at least two versions being offered through various Microsoft channels, and they appeared to have different feature sets, and I couldn't tell which one of them I ought to be using or if one was deprecated. Discord has spoiled me with chat that Just Works on the web.

It really doesn't work well. I tried making a simple call with web skype with my parents the other day; neither them - android tablet - nor me - linux desktop - could accept the call when video was on by default. We couldn't turn video on if we initiated a voice call either, because it immediately crashed and stop the call.

I don't know anyone who uses it as their casual messaging client, and I've never used their mobile app. But looking at it now it looks decent, and if they wanted to they could probably match their competitors pretty quickly, if they're not already. The rest is mostly marketing, I'm thinking they could use their reputation as a reliable long term partner to their advantage, and maybe promise to not use peoples contacts to sell ads.

Last time I had the Skype app installed it was trying to clone Snapchat and crashed when I tried to message someone. Admittedly that was a while ago, but I'm not sure where they were trying to go with it.

While we are a Google shop for the most part when it comes to messaging, we use Skype for colleagues in China or when traveling there. It is far better quality compared to Hangouts in the Great Firewall.

I don't think the problem is even one app. They should have had a central board where people set interoperability standards then they can build multiple apps. As long as hangouts could talk with Allo etc it doesn't matter and people can use the one they prefer and it's irelevant to another person's descion.

Now Google have dug a deeper hole as there is little change any tech influencer is going to use or promote Google messaging apps to their circle.

Personally I'm available on Signal, Skype and WhatsApp and it's going to take a hell of a change to make me care about trying something else.

It's so many things Google can't decide what they want.
Almost all their Google services are login-based. Your gmail login works on search, on youtube, on calendar, on anything really. Yes. On Hangouts too.
But not Allo/Duo. Someone thought it would be hipper to throw that out the window and have people use their phone number instead. Cool. Sure. But why make that the only choice for almost a year?

It's like nobody at Google uses an iPhone or has heard of Facetime. "Oh look, there's an app that lets you call and at a tap of a button turns that call into video! I wonder if we should do something similar?" "- nah, that would be too easy."

I have lived back and forth between Europe and the USA over the last few years. Communication is always the most difficult part of the move. It's a reminder of how far off our tech is from the true ideal.

In Europe, everyone has WhatsApp. For a while, this was great! One app, one "to reply" list. A taste of what messaging could be.

I quickly found myself frustrated. WhatsApp relies on phone numbers, which muddies up my contacts with people who keep old numbers for WhatsApp but do SMS and calls on another. Then there was the time I switched my WhatsApp number and couldn't receive messages from anyone until I sent them a message first-- inadvertently pissing off a few friends of mine before I realized.

And now, being back in the States, Europeans are trying to call the number listed on WhatsApp, and getting voicemail, and I have to change my email signature to encourage them not to.

And my American colleages are sending me SMS and calling, but using my old number from last year. Verizon won't let me keep a SIM for more than a few months, so I have to pay the activation fee every year, and I can't use a different provider because I bought a Verizon branded phone (NEVER AGAIN) and I want LTE and Hotspots to work.

And my mom is used to iMessage, so she sends me horribly compressed photos via SMS, no matter how often I tell her to send elsewhere. Who knows how many she tried to send to my old number...

On top of all of this, I have active group chats going in WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, Discord and Facebook messenger on any given day. I always forget who said what, where. Digging up old addresses and contacts that people sent me is a nightmare.

I often think about sending a mass message telling everyone to switch to ONE_PERFECT_MESSAGING_APP. I thought that might be Allo (or is it Duo? Which one is chat?). Imagine my anger if I had actually tried that! Thankfully my euro tech skeptics talked me out of it-- "I will never switch to a Google app!", they said.

What can I do? I feel hopeless, trapped between tech Giants making economic decisions that hurt me, instead of working together to make our lives easier (like they claim at the beginning of this PR piece)

EDIT: I don't like whining, I like solving problems-- so I created a therapy group called OOMA - Only One Messaging App - and we are going to solve this humanitarian problem. Our discord is here https://discord.gg/CmdgUp

I agree with you, but a hardware specific messaging app is just stupid.

As you can tell by the length of my last post, thinking about this situation has got me upset.

So upset, that right now I've decided to launch a non-profit, open collective organization called OOMA. Only One Messaging App.

OOMA will be comprised of the millions of people who are annoyed and upset at the result of tech companies competing for our communication. We are taking things into our own hands. We are agreeing to switch to ONE service, for ALL of our messaging needs. All of us, all over the world, all at once.

We are going to do 5 things, in order:
1. Choose a switch date.
2. Define a spec for the "perfect messaging app" (encryption, licensing, finance model, features, tech, etc.)
3. Invite companies to pitch their app, and/or secure funding to develop our own to spec.
4. Spread the word.
5. Make the switch.

I'm going to prepare a marketing web page and (ironically) a discord server right now. At the very worst it's a fun side project and way to express my anger.

What's the old phrase? If it looks stupid but it works, its not stupid. Say hello to the world's most valuable public company and what is commonly regarded as the world's highest quality messaging network.

A truth technologists hate hearing: You cannot, under any circumstances, solve problems created by code by creating more code.

Right, building another messaging app is not the right approach. But choosing one of the many existing solutions, and somehow convincing all of my social circle to move to it-- that's the problem I want to solve! Has anyone done it before?

If email and SMS was invented today, they wouldn't be open and decentralized. Everything is locked and centralized nowadays, since everything is tied to accounts at companies wanting to make money of of you. It's the current state of the Internet, a world wide open network with siloed incompatible services.

I'm actually contemplating ICQ, it's still around and looks no worse than any other service. Matrix might be a better solution though, it's federated and open. https://matrix.org/blog/home/

ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, PawWaw, Yahoo Messenger, Odigo, (and 30 more names I can't remeber) - there was a huge instant messaging war, the first stage of which was decidedly won by AOL (with AIM and the purchase of ICQ), but Microsoft later made great headway through sheer monopoly force and persistence - but that eventually became irrelevant with SMS taking over as the main form of instant messaging and then WhatsApp taking the world by storm.

None of this was open source. Not a single one of the successful messengers. In fact, AOL fought alternative clients fiercely all the time, and Microsoft started fighting them as soon as they got non-trivial market share.

What about XMPP (Which started life as Jabber before being standardized?)? Well, that one is open source. But it only survived and flourished because all the commercial outfits were busy fighting each other.

I was tangentially involved with the failed instant messaging standardization process at the turn of the millennium, and Jabber was by far the worst technical proposal at the time -- but the process was political, and when the committee disbanded due to all the political infighting, Jabber, which didn't have the commercial interests, was the remaining option.

1) Port your US number to Google Voice for a one time fee of $25 ; from now on, you can use this number to forward to your new verizon number (also: T-Mobile had much better plans for only a few months at a time, every single time I checked).

2) Get service in Europe from an Illiad affiliated phone company; At least in the past, that included free US numbers you could forward your US google voice to freely -- as well as 15-45 days of free US roaming service. Maybe these offers are gone now - you could just pay $1/month or so to LocalPhone or a similar company to do that forwarding for you.

3) Buy the cheapest Android handset running a recent version (for security updates); I got a new Meizu m6 for ~$90, you could probably go lower for 1st hand or get a 2nd hand at $40 or so.

4) When travelling, switch SIMs between main phone and cheap phone, set up forwarding (directly if included in plan, or through LocalPhone or similar if not), and keep cheap phone on WiFi only, plugged in charging at home, and mostly accessible for when needed.

5) Use WhatsApp web on the new phone to continue using old WhatsApp number. Less than ideal - messages don't pop up - but it works well.

For about $100 one time[0], and about $1/month or so, you could to keep both numbers fully functional and working indefinitely.

[0] Ok, so you'll have to upgrade the cheap phone for security reasons every few years. So not exactly one time, but possible $20/year amortized, or free if you don't trade-in your old main phone and just let it rot like many people do.

The only “green” people I know are google employees and my mom, who can’t afford an iPhone. The solution is simple to their problem- buy an iPhone.

It’s almost like the iPhone is a fetish or totem that grants access to iMessage (although you can message from macos or iCloud.com impractically).

It’s quite strange how this is a very simple, solved, problem for iPhone for many years. Google can fix it by literally cloning iMessage and arguing with carriers. They don’t. I suspect it’s because they want to be the only one with access to the cleartext and they aren’t willing to make a consumer-focused decision to keep all messages ciphertext.

So “most of the planet” has to suffer Google’s anti-consumer decision.

Okay, your experience is ... not representative. In this world there are tons of people using iphones, tons of other people using android. You see both frequently. There happen to be way more people using android but it doesn't matter, because there are sizable numbers using both, we should only consider solutions that work on both.

I agree, it’s not representative at all. But my point is that android users have problems because of the device they buy. There are likely trade offs. But google doesn’t want to solve this problem on a way that customers want.

It’s like buying a diesel vehicle and then complaining that the hybrid systems suck for them. Don’t buy a diesel if you want hybrid engines. Or work with the manufacturer to change their incentive model.

But google is an ad company and is unlikely to make products where it is hard to sell ads.

And if your "Only One Messaging App" is a monoculture proprietary product with dubious profit goals than you can count me, and large swaths of tech minded people, out.

The only way forward is either Matrix or something like it. And even then you need enough momentum to bend all the walled gardens of Google / MS / FB / etc to have to play ball with a common federated protocol. Good luck getting that without the ludicrous budgets the market leaders have to throw at trying to force everyone into their own proprietary chat bubble.

We almost had that in the mid 2000s and the Google jumped ship first to Hangouts. They basically started this whole mess by going from a time where MSN Messenger, Facebook Messenger, and Google Talk were all speaking the same XMPP language. Since then all three have gone total proprietary with design decisions around locking people in than providing a useful product.

Some things are fine to have proprietary giants trying to fight for your eyeballs over, such as entertainment. But communication should be something we can agree on, as a society. This is the kind of thing we should have international interoperable standards on. Email was a lucky break that SMTP and IMAP ended up being mandatory, because even today Google is trying their damn hardest to implement Gmail in anything other but an interoperable way but know it would destroy their product to ever turn the compatibility off.

1. A centralized and proprietary system, but with a transparent and non-profit governance structure. I understand the costs and technical challenges of global communication are bigger than say, wikipedia... but is it impossible?

2. The power of collective action. Communications apps don't put users first because we have no bargaining power. What would they do for us if we threatened to leave, en-mass (or vice versa, if enough people offered to collectively adopt their solution?).

And honestly, the problem might be better approached as a personal, social one: I don't care what the world uses, how do I get my social and professional circle to adopt one single solution?

This is more what I have in mind with "Only One Messaging App". We've grown 800% in the last quarter, so keep an eye out for us :P

I worked around the problem you describe by getting a google voice number and using that at the front end for my real numbers. My GV# is the face for whatsapp, telegram, whatever asks for my number. Also helps that I can send and receive sms over data or WiFi anywhere in the world.

Doesn’t work with some sms gateways that don’t y’all GV, but the best international I know.

Each country gets a new sim with a local number for data and local texts but I never give it out.

I guess that makes a lot more sense... I just wish I knew why four separate apps are needed in the first place.

Why can't text and audio/video be supported in the same app? Skype, Hangouts, HipChat (RIP) and many other messaging programs have been doing it for ages. It's simple and intuitive.

The Hangouts Chat/Meet split is particularly confusing. Aside from supporting more people in a call, I really don't understand what makes a Meet call better than the old Hangouts calls. My confusion is only compounded by Google's continued support for calls on the old Hangouts (now "Hangouts Chat"?).

Is there really such a big difference between an enterprise chat service and a personal one? Companies were turning to Hangouts long before Google announced it would become an enterprise-focused service.

HipChat (RIP) and Slack have obvious enterprise features that would seem out-of-place in a personal chat app... but Hangouts doesn't have any such features. It became popular without them. Why change your development focus all of the sudden? Why not continue marching towards a unified communications app and let the enterprise customers just do their thing?

I'm sure, given proper context and information, most of the decisions leading up to this point make sense in isolation. Still, Google really needs to sit down and figure out where they want all these apps to be in 5 years because - though I'm far from the first (or last) to say it - this is a mess.

If I understand this correctly none of these 4 products will allow you to send text based messages to another person on a desktop computer without having to create an entreprise hangout. Is that not a use case worth caring about anymore? You can’t even chat with someone else from Google’s own Chrome OS.

Good grief. It seems like they are doing everything possible to not make something as good as Apple Messages. Data chat without a phone number, interoperability with conventional SMS and the ability to start an instant FaceTime. And with Group FaceTime, it’s even more compelling. You can even do audio only or start a real phone call or send a video or audio message, all in one place. Other than org politics, I can’t understand why Google messaging services are a convoluted mess. I need a flowchart just to understand it all.

It has to hurt somewhere inside Google to kill Allo but not Duo. I honestly expected the opposite given the original push behind these apps. The problem with all these messaging experiences is that none of them work well on both dekstop and mobile. They seem to be optimized one way or the other.

If Google had a Telegram like experience (my favorite messaging app by far) along with their meetings app, their messaging woes would be over. I'm not sure what prevents them from creating something like that ? They seem to be driven by internal priorities/politics and lack a basic ability to see things from consumers' perspective.

Hangout was good but it feels like Google whiteanted this product in the hope people would head to Allo/Duo. While in reality they just pushed people away completely.

I find it amazing how these decisions are made... it seems like most people here could see the train wreck coming from this at the beginning. Are the descion makers that bad? Did no-one have the guts to discuss how bad these things looked or were they arrogant enought to feel they can fly above market sentiment... I always find it interesting how bad decisions are made in such seemingly obvious circumstances.

I should take my timeline of Google's chat fumbles [1] and keep it updated. A lot has happened since. But Allo's stagnation has been known since April 2018 [2], and "classic" Hangouts' decline has long been suspected in light of the new services also prefixed by the same name.

This post seemed like it might cut the BS and explain what's going on, but it's tinged with PR platitudes and is unacceptably unclear and nonchalant about "classic" Hangouts' fate. They're basically saying they'll shut it down soon but not quite yet.

So basically - "If you need to do video calling, use Duo. If you need to send messages Android to Android use Android Messaging. If you need a cross platform messaging service outside of enterprise use Hango...ooops"

Genuine question here, as I've read both the post and all the comments here and I still can't figure this out: Does this blog post say google's consumer text messaging strategy is now "send an email?"

I read the post as saying Messages is for Android consumer text messaging, Duo for cross-platform consumer video, and Hangouts for enterprise text and video. That doesn't seem to leave anything for friends doing text chat outside of Android.

When google voice was introduced, I ported my phone number. It was nice to use the service. Before that, I had a grandstream ATA. The service was great.

Now, everyday feels worse. Last month, I was traveling abroad and had more important things to do than to confirm the cellular number linked to voice was still mine. So google decided not just to stop redirecting phonecalls, but also to stop me from calling using the dialer app.

Basically, my "phone privileges" was unilaterally revoked by google because I did not obey the phone number verification procedure.

I have previously checked companies like callcentric, but it is now one of my priority. I can't entrust google with my phone service in 2019.

I'm going to miss Hangouts. Anyone have any good alternatives for free and anonymous browser-based video calling?

For context, I use a permanent Google Hangouts link under my account and made a subdomain of my domain redirect to it (http://partytime.jmistri.com). Whenever I want to talk to someone or have an informal group call, I can tell them to "hop on partytime". It doesn't require an account and it's a great high-quality video call on-the-go.

The main reason I still use Google Meet is that appear.in has a full-fat P2P model where your video and audio must stream to every user and vice versa. Even with 4 people that can get pretty taxing on a poor connection.

Google does smarter muxing of video and audio streams and is better about throttling video quality to preserve bandwidth when required.

It's beyond ridiculous to say 'we failed to gain traction with a free solution that anybody can install on any Android and iPhone and use it TODAY' and replace that with 'but we will succeed in gaining traction with a solution that only runs on a few select phones and need carrier support and where you never know if the person you are trying to message has a compatible device on a compatible carrier".

I don't understand why can't just Google copy iMessage exactly as it is. They can just tie up the chat app like Hangouts to the Gmail ID and just build SMS and Video functionality into it. And make it available by default. So when I want to SMS, Text, or Video I don't need to "think" which app to use. They can just get rid of their Messages, Allo, Duo, etc and just stick to one default messaging app.

I think the main reason people use hangouts at all is because everyone has gmail open all the time, or at least everyone has a gmail account. It's just laziness for the most part. Not that chat is that hard a problem or that hangouts is so good. If you have to go to newshinymessenger.google.com at any point, the advantage will die.

But this leaves a giant hole in their consumer texting product. Have they given up on making a private, cross-platform texting product for consumers? Messages seems like it must use an Android phone as the user's primary device – as SMS requires OS integration and presumably RCS does too.

And neither SMS or RCS are private. Carriers have full visibility to all messages. That's light-years less secure than the end-to-end encryption offered by iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal, and even less private than the former Hangouts. (Say what you will about Google, I'd trust them with my private messages far more than any pair of cellular carriers.)

GChat was great because it wasn't locking users into Google's ecosystem. People from other platforms could chat with you directly because it supported federation.

With Hangouts they dropped XMPP because supposedly it was preventing them to innovate and because Microsoft and Facebook weren't playing as nice.

GChat was actually successful and I enjoyed it for a long time. I couldn't be happier that all of their other attempts are failing.

The problem with Google is that they've lost what made them special back in the day. What made them great was openness. They were building on top of standards. And nobody complained that their web properties are optimized for their own browser.

Nowadays they just want to lock people into their walled garden. Guess that's what happens when you're no longer the underdog.

Hangouts Chat is a standalone, text chat-only app (chat.google.com), similar in functionality to Slack. It will/does have the ability for third-party developers to create bots, etc.

Hangouts Meet is a pared down video calling interface that is geared specifically for "one person presenting to others" type of communications. Both of these (according to this blog) will only be available to G Suite (enterprise) users.

> Meet is a pared down video calling interface that is geared specifically for "one person presenting to others"

Yeah, no. Meet is the most equal-among-all video conferencing app I've ever seen. It's ability to promote the speaker to the main window is uncannily good. It is my go-to, and I use it intercontinental and inter-org.

One of the absolute top features of Hangouts is indexing chats into your Gmail search results. And yet here goes Google yet again applying the foot gun to a useful feature. Do they buy bullets in bulk or something?

I was a user of hangouts for the last 10 years already since a closed for public alpha-beta. It was wonderful product for companies, for teams. It was so easy to create a meeting (because it had an integration with google calendar) invite everyone, add some people phone number to join the same conversation. It just worked and it was the best on the market. Then Google decided to kill this product one by one removing useful features like: conference call, external plugins, jabber support (jabber allowed to easily integrate with other corporate stuff). Finally Hangouts transformed from a must-have-thing into another-chat-app-none-use. I waited a long time, but there's still NO DESKTOP client. I suppose Google believe in mobile first world etc. but REALITY says 99% of corporate work's done DESKTOP. And web based-chat is not a solution at all. Before I can use alternative clients like psy, it wasn't really convenient but it worked well, until it was killed. Death of Hangouts was predictable due to lack attention to the detail and building a wall of ignorance of their users. By the way mobile version hangouts may built on electron because it's the SLOWEST application on my iPhone.

What's really annoying is that they killed off the one thing that was closest to a desktop client [the one seen here: https://github.com/old-hangouts/old-hangouts-chrome-extensio...] and had unintrusive windows that could be made floating, or docked/minimzed to the bottom of the screen. It was incredibly productive.

I use Hangouts as a desktop messaging client to communicate with my Mom. She has a Chromebook, but no Android phone. I also use Hangouts (from my desktop) to communicate with friends via an ongoing chat stream (with the occasional video chat).

My use case seems to be falling through the cracks with Google's new approach. I guess I will be signing my Mom up with a Google Voice number and switching to Skype for for my video chats.

While I'm NOT using anymore Google services I have few sparse world about Google communication services:

- GMail (webui and apps), Hangout (webui&app), Drive, ... skyrocketing their weight in Mb and cpu cycles without addin really anything new in the last few years. Only if we read "changelogs" on Play store there is nearly anytime "bugfix and improvements" so nothing that can justify such size change. Only data mining probably changed.

- What all users I talk about and me want from a communication service is communication and convergence, so decision to separate SMS from hangout, to have a separate app on Android for Hangout calls etc are simply anti-users features I do not know why are created.

- Allo/Duo seems more an experiment to test their users stupidity/reaction, mine was deinstall them the same day I install few days after first availability announcement.

- I know Google is changed recently with the disastrous new direction, but I remark that Google in the past was NOT a philanthropic geek project and it have made big money on users data as it make today, only real change I see is that in the past such "data spill" was recompensed by good and effective services, now services or disappear or remain the same and became pachydermic.

Long story short: dear Alphabet, you are NOT our "alphabet" nor something we can't live without. Personally I discover many new and nice things leaving your services apart. So I think in the near future you will start to loose users and begin suffer "IBM syndrome"/"bureaucratic syndrome" to the last level, seeing your size you probably do not die quickly but certainly you start to loose profit.

Super short version: stupidity has increased super-rapidly but not so rapidly, not at a live someone want.

Why don't they build one chat system that all of these features work with. And when they want to try a new feature, put it as an option on the same app. You don't need to make a new chat app all the time! Pick one, give it a video call option, let it do sms, let it chat with people with google account, make it work with business domains hosted by google. Done!

Google is discountinuing Allo next year. I have never been affected by one of these decisions by Google since I try to stay away from their ecosystem, but I am confident this is a way to lose user trust.

This article is a good summary of all the past and current attempts Google has made at messaging, for those like me who can't keep up. Outside of maybe Google employees, is there anyone who can at this point?

> Thanks to partnerships with over 40 carriers and device makers, over 175 million of you are now using Messages, our messaging app for Android phones, every month.

It's amazing how low this is for their market share, compared to iMessage which so seamlessly integrated SMS and more-than-SMS years ago. Given that Google do dictate preinstalled apps on Android it's not obvious why they've never managed to clone the iMessage experience.

My takeaway from this post was google saying : We acknowledge that Hangouts, Duo, Allo exist and we think they were orphaned for too long and we are adopting them back. Hangouts to me is like Flash, useful but so out of touch with everyday needs of an ever evolving world and sadly forgotten. I love Google Photos, Duo as well as Messenger (SMS App) and i hope they don't end up in Google's Graveyard sometime soon.

I'm not turning to the Facebook family for a replacement. I've been backing away from them, as well; it was friends who dragged me into their products (Whatsapp, as well as FB proper and Instagram), in the first place.

Between the two, I trust Google more -- with limitations. I might be ok using their IM products to communicate with friends I can't convince to switch to something private, for lower risk communications. But... Google's made a complete sh-t-show out of their IM offers.

So, this is a Google customer -- or, "product" -- saying to them that one more launch won't make any difference. Users have been looking for one launch, then stop and just work on that.

You are looking at the wrong end of the stick. The people repeatedly launching: They're your problem. (Beta and all is fine: I kind of miss the days when it was genuinely so. This is something else, and it sucks.)

Still sounds like waffling to me. Unless they plan on acting now (dropping something tomorrow) I suspect these plans can easily change again. Just as they did through Allo and the last time they tried to differentiate their many competing solutions to the same problem.

Meanwhile, many people are not interested in waiting around to find or figure it out. Plenty of clear and concise alternatives.

Google has clearly got internal problems with their product management. It is a well-known fact that the fewer options you have the easier the choice.
Once you have to choose between similar things with intersecting feature sets you find yourself in the center of uncomfortable mess.
And there is no one to blame but those who make high level decisions in Google.

I wonder if what they're doing is trying to refine each individual aspect of communication as much as possible in various apps so that later they can merge them all into one massive super-app. So, email, texting, messaging, video chat, voice, all merged into "Google Human" or something crazy.

Hangouts Chat is such a botched launch. It is backwards compatible with single user chat and not group chats. It effectively ensures that people cannot completely migrate to it. The overhead of keeping 2 apps and getting the same notification twice was too much - ended up going back to classic Hangouts.

I may need to read that mess several more times to understand what they're doing, but from what I gather if I just want to do video chat with family with Google stuff, I'll need to use their "Duo" app. Does anyone use that and know if it also works in a browser (preferably Firefox)?

What do all of these messenger clients and things bring to the table that didn't already exist on AOL instant messenger 20 years ago?

Slack seems like (badly) redone IRC. My computer 20 years ago could run mIRC without issue, and yet my brand new modern macbook pro with 16 gigs of ram chokes on the slack client. WHY?

Hangouts seems like (badly) redone AIM. For some unbelievable reason, since about 6 years ago, I can't quite ever figure out how to open or close the "hangouts" application, and google just keeps making it more confusing.

It started out pretty sane: either use the mobile site in gmail.com, or open the (beautiful, fast, stable) google talk desktop application. Eventually the desktop application got deprecated, and I HAD to use chrome, but that was essentially okay since it had some nice features. It would dock messages to the bottom of your browser, which was cool.

But at some point, google deprecated that, and won't even let you run the old version of it anymore. Now you HAVE to either use gmail.com, or some application that can only seemingly run if chrome (a giant memory hog) is also running. Oh and for some reason the mobile version of the application wants to send SMS messages? But like sometimes it's SMS but sometimes it isn't, an it's not really obvious which is which??!?

All of this messaging stuff is seriously driving me crazy. In what world does it make sense that facebook messenger is somehow the easiest, most stable messaging client? WTF? If we could all just agree to start using AIM again, and if they could get file transfers and voice chat working 100%...my god. It would be amazing. And imagine how fast it would run on modern hardware!

For Slack / IRC: Slack is a much easier IRC: you don't need a bouncer to keep your session open, you can easily send files / images / videos, code snippets, a lot of integrations are baked in and work very well.

For hangouts / AIM: Can you do video chat on AIM ?

Also, for AIM, you still need someone to maintain the server, but I don't think people are ready to pay for chat. And they But why would a company host for free a server for an open protocol like AIM ? Why do you think we don't see more big companies behind it?

Also, I think voice chats work very well with facebook messenger (I don't remember that it worked that well in the golden era of AIM and MSN messenger).

The best part about Wave was that it was/is federated, so your data isn't completely siloed like basically every other modern app mentioned in this thread. It's more like e-mail. With sufficient resourcing, it could have revolutionized communication.